New McAfee software secures all

Workgroup IT has announced the local availability of McAfee’s Security Management 5 software, which the company touts as a security solution for all sized businesses, offering unified monitoring, management and reporting systems.

Workgroup IT’s McAfee division has announced the local availability of McAfee’s Security Management 5, a unified monitoring, management and reporting system that scales to any-sized organisation and ensures all endpoints, networks and content are secure. ‚Business’ security purchases today are mostly tactical, creating a patchwork of independent security products that are separately managed,‚ says Andrea van der Westhuizen, product manager: McAfee at Workgroup IT. ‚Threats are accelerating at a rate that far surpasses the existing approach to managing multiple products and layers of security independently.

‚In order to effectively stay ahead of security threats, companies must be able to view all risks associated with mobile devices via a centralised view.‚

McAfee Security management 5 zones in on four key areas in an attempt to address these requirements and they are: Application enablement ‚ new interfaces and software development kits (SDKs) provide an open platform for companies, developers and partners to integrate centralised security management into existing business processes. McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) platform offers a Web API that enables customers and partners to integrate security operations into change and systems management frameworks.

A new version of McAfee’s Risk Advisor includes a SDK that enables rapid integration of new security countermeasures, broadening the risk profile view and reducing operational costs.

Shared intelligence ‚ provides coordinated defences across security layers so that endpoints, networks, email, Web and data layers work together to minimise or eliminate security attacks.

McAfee has integrated its Global Threat Intelligence across its broad portfolio of products, delivering a shared threat intelligence model, says Van der Westhuizen. McAfee Host Intrusion Prevention is integrated with file and network connection reputation intelligence enabling customers to identify and drop suspicious network connections.

The company has also ported its threat intelligence to the iPhone and iPad enabling IT security professionals to have real-time access to threat information wherever and whenever they need it.

Unified management ‚ McAfee Security Management can administer the security of any device, data, network, application, or database across security implementations that range from hosted/SaaS to on-premises as well as hybrid and virtual and physical environments. McAfee recently announced the McAfee Management for Optimised Virtualized Environments (MOVE) platform providing advanced endpoint protection for virtualised systems. The McAfee MOVE platform includes the automated ability for security management policies to follow the virtual host they are associated with regardless of where it is located and how often it is moved.

Situational awareness ‚ allows businesses to monitor, manage and report on metrics to reduce risk, focus security efforts and investments, and reduce costs. On the SaaS Platform, McAfee provides automatic asset discovery and synchronisation through integration with Microsoft Active Directory that eliminates manual asset entry and out-of-sync security policies.

ePO also adds the ability to create Situational Policy Assignments ‚ logical groupings of policies that security administrators can apply to assets based on business or security posture need.

Further, the new version of McAfee Risk Advisor includes selective threat and asset analysis to display risk profiles for sub-groups like specific departments or geographies, giving organisations the ability to increase threat detection and reduce response time.